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This video comes from “This is What 80 Looks Like!” — the event which honored Rabbi Arthur Waskow and Gloria Steinem on Nov 3, 2013, as they approached their 80th birthdays. These portions of the event feature Gloria and Reb Arthur discussing our current time.

Gloria likens the United States today to the moment of heightened danger faced by a battered woman escaping the house of her abuser on the way to freedom. Reb Arthur follows with his analogy of this time as an earthquake in which we have three choices. Which will we choose?

This video comes from “This is What 80 Looks Like!” — the event which honored Rabbi Arthur Waskow and Gloria Steinem on Nov 3, 2013, as they approached their 80th birthdays.Reb Arthur, founder and director of The Shalom Center, was introduced by Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, who was recently named the most influential rabbi in America.

This video has the full Introduction by Rabbi Saperstein. A front-page article about the event in the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent reported some of its highlights:

“With the 1969 publication of Waskow’s Freedom Seder, the entire course of contemporary Jewish liturgical writing was altered. Waskow’s take on the Seder completely reimagined a traditional text and raised urgent moral issues by focusing on the struggles of African-Americans.

“He has had a profound impact on the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements and it is time — and then some — that he be acknowledged.”

VIDEO: During the week before Passover/ Holy Week in 2013, Reb Arthur Waskow was arrested with other clergy and religious leaders at the White House while participating with Interfaith Moral Action for the Climate in a pre-Passover/ Holy Week interfaith service. Beside him, waiting to be arrested a few minutes later, was Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, a member of The Shalom Center’s Board and a member of the faculty of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. Click on the title or the triangle on the video pane to watch the two-minute video. Details of this action are located at https://theshalomcenter.org/arrested-palms-matzah-globe-and-white-house

VIDEO: Gloria Steinem attributes her perseverance to a time, during the 1968 Democratic Convention, when Reb Arthur said to her, “It’s important. Everything you do is important.” As told in spring 2012.

Click on this title to see the video of what Reb Arthur calls the best speech of his life, only six minutes long: to the student body of his high school alma mater, “Baltimore City College” (the third oldest public high school in the US) in fall 2011, upon receiving a distinguished alumnus award. (He was graduated in 1950.) During the talk, he tells a story of the challenge to what, looking back, was his first attempt at “prophetic” leadership — and encourages the current student body’s prophetic leadership today, into tomorrow.

Our world is in deep crisis, a planetary earthquake. Old stabilities -- economic, political, ecological, sexual, familial -- are shaking beneath our feet and in our bellies. What can Judaism do to create from this crisis a planetary community, rather than a global disaster? What shape would a "transformative Judaism" have to take -- concerned not only with renewing the Jewish people but also with healing the world? Rabbi Arthur Waskow provides a fascinating glimpse into the heart of these questions and appeals for new thought as well as new action. For an even fuller exploration of "transformative Judaism," click to his essay here.Add your own comments after his essay!

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Make a recurring donation and receive Freedom Journeys as our token of appreciation. Click here for more info about the book. Freedom Journeys is a deep meditation on the timeless—and timely—relevance of the Exodus narrative. In the grand tradition of mystical exegesis, Waskow and Berman reflect upon Exodus not only as an event that happened “then” and “there”, but a paradigm of movement that is happening here and in the now, for all of us, Jew and Muslim, Black and White, male and female. —Omid Safi, professor of Islamic studies, University of North Carolina.